to struggle to acceptance against honest but mind-blind students. Harvey
knew his contemporaries well, and for twelve successive years
demonstrated the circulation of the blood before daring to publish the
facts on which the truth was based.[D]
Only steadfastness of purpose and humility enable the student to shift
his position to meet the new conditions in which new truths are born, or
old ones modified beyond recognition. And, thirdly, the honest heart
will keep him in touch with his fellow students, and furnish that sense
of comradeship without which he travels an arid waste alone. I say
advisedly an honest heart--the honest head is prone to be cold and
stern, given to judgment, not mercy, and not always able to entertain
that true charity which, while it thinketh no evil, is anxious to put
the best possible interpretation upon the motives of a fellow worker. It
will foster, too, an attitude of generous, friendly rivalry untinged by
the green peril, jealousy, that is the best preventive of the growth of
a bastard scientific spirit, loving seclusion and working in a
lock-and-key laboratory, as timorous of light as is a thief.
You have all become brothers in a great society, not apprentices, since
that implies a master, and nothing should be further from the attitude
of the teacher than much that is meant in that word, used though it be
in another sense, particularly by our French brethren in a most
delightful way, signifying a bond of intellectual filiation. A fraternal
attitude is not easy to cultivate--the chasm between the chair and the
bench is difficult to bridge. Two things have helped to put up a
cantilever across the gulf. The successful teacher is no longer on a
height, pumping knowledge at high pressure into passive receptacles. The
new methods have changed all this. He is no longer Sir Oracle, perhaps
unconsciously by his very manner antagonizing minds to whose level he
cannot possibly descend, but he is a senior student anxious to help his
juniors. When a simple, earnest spirit animates a college, there is no
appreciable interval between the teacher and the taught--both are in the
same class, the one a little more advanced than the other. So animated,
the student feels that he has joined a family whose honor is his honor,
whose welfare is his own, and whose interests should be his first
consideration.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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